WASHINGTON – The federal government identified two sites in Arizona
Tuesday as hot spots for solar energy, part of a larger plan to spur
development of utility-scale solar projects in six Western states.

The Arizona sites, in Brenda and Gillespie, cover just under 6,000
acres and have the potential to generate 663 megawatts of electricity,
the Interior Department said.

In all, the department and the Bureau of Land Management selected 17
sites covering 284,918 acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada,
New Mexico and Utah with the potential to generate 31,000 megawatts of
energy.

“It maps out where it makes sense to develop solar energy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said of the solar-energy zones identified Tuesday. “It also maps out where not to develop solar energy.”

Applications for a power project in one of the zones will get “faster
and easier permitting, improved mitigation strategies, and economic
incentives,” the department said.

The zones were selected for their “excellent solar resources, good
energy transmission potential, and relatively low conflict with
biological, cultural and historic resources,” said a department news release.

In selecting the zones, the government passed over 19 million acres
that it put into a “variance” category, which means those lands could be
developed for solar, but will not be given preferential treatment.

The Western Watersheds
Project said in comments on a draft of the plan that if developers can
build power plants on public lands outside the solar zones, it
“completely undermines any credibility behind the … argument for
designating SEZ in the first place.”

Arizona has 3.38 million acres of proposed variance land, with 28 pending applications for solar projects on them.

Others said they would like to have seen more, or larger, zones identified by Interior and BLM.

“I think the BLM could have identified more zones,” said John Shepard, senior advisor for the Sonoran Institute, which advised the bureau on the solar zones project.

For the sake of fairness, however, the bureau decided not to include
more than 400,000 acres on which there were already applications for
solar-power projects, Shepard said.

The hope is that applicants will gravitate toward the solar zones, said Ian Dowdy, conservation outreach associate at Arizona Wilderness Coalition. But if the zones prove popular, he worried that there might not be enough designated land in Arizona.

But the environmental impact statement released with the project
notes that the government can expand the zones in the future. Salazar
called Tuesday’s announcement a “blueprint” for renewable energy policy
for the future.

“This is a huge milestone,” he said. “Today’s announcement serves as a roadmap for solar energy for decades to come.”

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The government identified 17 solar energy zones in six Western states as areas where business opportunity is high and environmental risk is low, and where it hopes to speed development of utility-scale solar power projects.

Putting it where the sun does shine

The Interior Department and the Bureau of Land Management have identified 17 sites in six Western states as particularly suitable for solar-energy development. The sites and their potentials for power production are:

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